


Factors Of Nine

by SatiricalDraperies



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Ariadne (Inception)-centric, Gen, Post-Canon, excessive use of metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 09:49:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15531630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SatiricalDraperies/pseuds/SatiricalDraperies
Summary: Ariadne is...different after limbo.(Different, in that she traipses through minds much like how one might walk through a garden)





	Factors Of Nine

1.

The mind is a maze. And only Ariadne has the string that shows the way out.

It began with Cobb, as everything in this adventure seems to stem from. He structured his memories into levels, but Ariadne sees past that. They are not chronological,and they don’t seem to follow any other logical patterns, so why would Cobb order his subconscious like this? It’s the hidden connections she makes between levels that give Ariadne access to the real passageways of his mind. She walks down newly formed corridors, always turning inwards, downwards. She doesn’t realize it yet (this is the first mind she’s walked, and it all seems new and exciting), but Cobb is just like everyone else. Everyone has a cornerstone, buried deep at the center. It’s only when you reach the innermost rings that it becomes hard to find what the defining aspect of someone’s life is. Ariadne passes Mal, many times, but she has this gut feeling that Cobb isn’t as wrapped around Mal’s little finger as everyone thinks. 

What does he want more than anything else? What would Dominick Cobb lay down his life for? What would he fight for, kill for, ruin lives for? _Who_ would he destroy the entire world for?

And then Ariadne has her answer, and she runs straight towards the center, calling out Philippa and James’ names. 

2.

Once Ariadne knows the questions to ask, she runs through minds like Pheidippides on his way to Athens. She finds the center, notes the dead ends and roundabouts, and then binds it all together into a neat little package, tied with a bow and labelled with a note on how to properly use the mind, because what’s the point of having this ability if she doesn’t use it?

She runs a few more jobs with the rest of the Fischer team, minus Cobb, who’s still adjusting to a stable life of fatherhood. They just do simple extractions, nothing too complicated. It should be a relaxing break after performing the (in the words of Eames) bloody difficult inception, but it bores Ariadne. She wants to do more, knows that she is capable of more, and after honing her skills in deciphering the architecture of the mind, she can’t settle for easy marks. The fear that she will lose this second sight is ever present, and she could swear that it atrophies with disuse, decaying until she will eventually end up blind and lost in the world.

There is no way that can be allowed to happen. She’d go crazy.

So Ariadne strikes out on her own, at first selling her skills to the highest bidder. It’s a lot of corporate espionage, finding competitor’s secrets to lower their stocks, or sabotage a product release. All temporary fixes. The same company has hired her four times when she finally suggests inception. They say it’s impossible. She tells them she’s done it before. They ask how many people she’ll need. She doesn’t need any. They wish her good luck. She still doesn’t need any. They laugh at her (foolishness?) naiveté and reassure her that they’ll still hire her for extractions even after this fails. She just smiles and signs her name to the ten million dollar contract.

By the time the Champs-Élysées is covered with snow next year, Ariadne’s back in Paris, renting a penthouse apartment and only taking the jobs that interest her. The act of changing someone’s maze has become so second nature to her that she almost feels bad cheating all these businesses out of their inane sums, but then she remembers that they always come to her first with a predetermined estimate, and it really isn’t her fault that she’s so highly valued. She is a rarity, doing what others can only dream of, and that means something in this world. 

3.

Ariadne retires at the ripe old age of twenty nine. She is sick of these corporations with their games. It’s always the same thing, incepting one CEO or another with the same ideas over and over again. What she needs is a challenge.

So Ariadne waits and waits for a challenge to arrive. She keeps herself busy, reading through the university library and attending lectures, always staying in the back, obscured by shadows. Her face is too well known, and she doesn’t want to be interrupted by any of the unsavory characters of the underground dream-sharing world. After all, she’s here to learn. 

And one rainy Thursday, her patience finally pays off. A group of young men, wearing finely tailored dark suits like the ones Arthur was never seen without, stands together on the back wall of the lecture hall across from Ariadne. They don’t _huddle_ , per se, but speak furtively, with a sense of purpose and secrecy. This is more than enough to pique her curiosity, and she sidles closer, hoping to pick up a whisper of their conversations. 

She picks up more than a mere whisper. The men stick around after the lecture is finished, moving up front to speak with the professor, a known ex-INTERPOL agent. What is not common knowledge about her, however, is that she was crucial in a mission to reveal and stop an assassination plot against a visiting Hungarian official. Ariadne knows this, of course. The professor is extremely intelligent, and she was intrigued to know what went on in her mind. She wasn’t expecting the action-hero spy background, but it didn’t come as too much of a shock. 

She does find it surprising, though, that this meeting would be happening here and now, without at least a cursory check to make sure the hall was empty. This may be an oversight on their part, but Ariadne is glad that the fates have aligned for her to listen in, hiding in the back row of seats, not daring to breath for fear of discovery. The information shared here is too precious for that. It is the challenge she has been waiting for, and she is ready to act.

(What she does not, and will never know, is that one of the men recognized her face from earlier, and more importantly, he recognized her skills and took a gamble on her ability to help, or at least forget what she has heard, lest he end up losing everything he has to lose.)

4.

Ariadne has been tailing the double agent for nine days when she finally discovers where he spends his nights. While she no longer needs the PASIV to enter dreams, it is easier to manipulate people’s minds while asleep. They’re less likely to question why she is restructuring their entire psyches that way, and less likely to notice any changes until she’s already slipped away, quiet as a thief in the night.

It is a seedy hostel, buried in a maze of rickety buildings that were probably violating the health code regulations even back when they were originally built, a couple centuries ago. Luckily, Ariadne is very good at solving mazes, even ones that are falling apart.

She reaches the center of this particular maze in record time after a prostitute points the way, giggling and passing Ariadne a card with her number and name (Olivia - it’s a pretty name that Ariadne can imagine rolling off her tongue easily), and she pockets it. If she isn’t able to find and break into the mole’s room, it’s good to have a back up plan for the night.

Unfortunately for Ariadne’s sex life, the double agent proves to be easy to find. She climbs up the rusty fire escape and slips through the window carefully, making sure not to activate either of the trip wires he’s strung across it. She doesn’t know what would happen if she activated them, but she’d rather not find out. If all goes well tonight, he’ll never know she was there. 

It is just as difficult as she had imagined it to be, to change one’s loyalties. The mind of a mole is twisted, open passageways closing up like clogged arteries, stopped by threats and genuine concerns. Nothing is as it seems. She follows a pathway that winds through time, all the places he’s visited, all the people he’s met, and it feels like _truth_ to her. But then she follows it around a corner and she’s right where she began, at the bottom of the Penrose steps. _The truth will betray you_ is what the mole has learned. Luckily, Ariadne doesn’t subscribe to that particular philosophy. She veers away from _truth_ and reaches out for her string.

A metaphysical rope, Ariadne trusts in this string as much as she trusts anything. It is the string that ties her to the dream world, that lets her enter dreams without the PASIV. It is the string that is the source of her power.

5.

_She is falling. The buildings above her stretch further and further away, reaching towards the sky as she plummets towards the ground. She cannot see the ground beneath her. The tops of the skyscrapers encircle her vision, shrinking the last square of blue until it becomes a miniscule pinprick, a speck of dust amongst the vastness of the cosmos._

_She is falling forever and ever._

_And then: a shock runs through her sternum, spreading out into the rest of her body. She is jolted by the sudden change in momentum as she is pulled upwards, harshly. This pull is fighting limbo itself to bring her out, two impossible forces at work, caught in tandem, and they should do nothing but balance each other out. But this is a dream, and nothing is impossible._

_She reaches up with both arms, muscles already fatigued with the effort, to grab at the rope that is now protruding from her chest. It is old and twisted, and she can feel it unraveling as limbo claims her as its own._

_But she is not done fighting. She places one hand above the other, and then she does it again, feeling like she will fall apart if she continues to struggle against limbo like this, knowing that if she stops, she will definitely fall apart, shattering and reforming only to be smashed to pieces. This is not the fate she has planned for herself, so she continues, body on fire, mind numb with cold._

_She pauses only once, when she can no longer see any buildings around her, only the darkness of a starless night. She thinks she may have escaped, for one brief joyful moment, but then she is pierced through the back. Limbo has thrown out one last desperate attempt to seize her, burying an icicle of anaesthesia in her heart. She loses her grip on the rope, hands slipping free. Her body arches back, curling around the wound in a perfect semi-circle. It is pain, pure and simple, spiking through her bloodstream, a bolt of lightning that destroys her in an instant, until she can feel nothing where it has been._

_Her paralysis lasts an instant, but limbo is not constrained by time. Her neurons fire in slow motion, languid thoughts of nothing. And, even as Ariadne herself dangles in the balance, limbo passes through her body until limbo is all there is, above and below and all around her._

_The instant passes._

_After the initial shock, she is able to regather herself, gripping the rope once again, pulling herself up out of limbo. She doesn’t look back or pause at all this time, just keeps putting one hand above the other until she can feel no more, and she wakes up to reality._

6.

Ariadne does not know it, but it was limbo that let her leave. She is most definitely in reality now, but she has brought limbo with her, buried deep inside of her. The string that she follows now is its manifestation. Only in limbo is a person’s mind laid out so plainly as to be a maze. Only in limbo can a person be rerouted and influenced so easily. Ariadne has an inkling that she is not completely free of limbo, but she is a woman of logic, after all, and as such she allows herself to neither accept nor reject this theory. Still, she figures, that is an issue for another time. Limbo might have placed a claim on her, but it has not come to collect her yet. 

So Ariadne has her freedom, and her string, and she takes full advantage of them, one hand resting loosely but surely around her string, and the other brushing against the walls of the spy’s mind. It is a conglomerate of every important location in his life, all meshed together. His mind is smoother than most, used to switching between roles quickly and seamlessly. The transition from one aspect to another is flawless, his mind disguising the past and future. All Ariadne can see around her is the _now_ , until the string leads her around a corner to a different _now_. Even for Ariadne, who’s had more practice running minds than probably anyone else in the world, it’s confusing. Were it not for her string, she would have walked herself into a paradox of self-lies by now. She wonders how the mole has not gotten himself caught in a web yet, and then she realizes: he has. He is a flea pretending to be a spider, and he is trapped in his own web.

Her string turns left once more (deeper, deeper) and she finds it tangled with strings of his mind’s creation. Metaphors are a tricky game. Cobb: the elevator, a useful linear passageway towards his center. But this web that Ariadne has caused the mole to conjure up? It is a sticky mess that Ariadne finds herself in front of. Somewhere in the maze-within-a-maze of milky white thread is his center. She sighs. This was her own doing, and she must work with herself here to undo it.

She plucks a strand. It sticks to her finger, stretching out of place. She watches it slowly remove itself from her, pulling away until it is only connected in one place, and then that too is gone. The whole thing recoils from her touch, springing back into its original location, thrumming back and forth in a blur until all the kinetic energy has dissipated and travelled down into the mass. 

She follows the movement with her eyes. A surprisingly small number of strands were affected. She plucks another, and traces this as well, noting the overlaps, the differences. There are many factors at work here, and it will take her many nights (even with the extended time of dreaming) to understand their implications well enough for her to decide which strands need to be cut to clear away the truth. Too much is at stake here for her to blindly slash and hack her way through. The challenge lies not in the act of cutting his ties, but in determining the least amount of interference she needs. After all, it would be nice to leave him (his mind, his self) intact at the end of this.

7.

It has taken a lifetime and a half of dreaming to fully map out his mind. Ariadne has tested every possibility, measuring the effects on his psyche, predicting his actions after she has finished altering his mind. It is times like this when she wishes that technology worked in dreams (do you know how many futures she has calculated by hand? the number is over four hundred billion), but while human extractors may be able to pass as extensions of the mind, the intelligence of machines is utterly foreign to the brain. Once she brought in a calculator, and it only spit out nonsense. With enough time, she could probably find the source of the errors and write a program to counteract it, but realistically it’s faster to do everything by hand.

Faster being a relative term, of course. Ariadne has spent so much time inside this man’s mind that she doesn’t even need the hundreds of pages of notes she has detailing his intricacies. She feels like she knows him better than she knows herself, and perhaps that’s true. After all, she’s never been able to study the insides of her own mind, only others. She has no idea where her own passageways lead, what might be hidden in dusty corners of her consciousness. 

She does not know what is at the center of her maze. At this point, she would not be surprised if she was spiraling inward forever, an infinite maze, raised in curiosity, carved in limbo, and held together with nothing but a fraught and fragile thread.

8\. 

She is a surgeon, not a butcher. The thought (reminder) keeps running through her head as she prepares to cut apart the webs holding the mole prisoner. She’s brought the number down to only nine strands. With nine quick slices, she will have irrevocably changed his mind, and with it the future.

It is a weighty task that is set before her. 

The necessary cuts are marked in red. Her scissors are small, precise. Her hands are steady, her breathing calm. Her heart is not pounding. It is not racing. She is aware of it in the back of her mind, a constant sinusoidal throbbing that reverberates in and out of the dream. It gives her something to hold on to, a reminder of her reality and the job she set out to accomplish.

As the next heartbeat reaches its climax, she snips the first strand. Her scissors glide through it easily. She watches as the two ends flutter and fall down, hanging in the mass that is left, limp. The life fades out from it in both directions from the epicenter of her cut, and, as the glow fades, the strand dissolves, leaving nothing but ash behind on the floor of his mind.

Ariadne is in shock at how _easy_ it was, to erase a passageway just like that. She does not know how many times he’s sent thoughts down that neural path, thoughts that he will never be able to have again. 

She briefly considers stopping now (she has done enough damage), but she knows that she cannot stop. She will not stop. Her calculations show that she must destroy eight more strands to ensure the best possible future, and she will not stop until she has reached that.

The next eight cuts are done without hesitation, and Ariadne is out of his mind, out of the hostel, out of the city, out of the country.

She is back in America, having just landed, walking through the international terminal, when she sees his face on one of the many muted television screens. She stops. The people behind her shove past, banging their suitcases on hers, anxious to exit. Ariadne doesn’t even notice, trying to follow along with the delayed subtitles. _Double agent… carrying state secrets… turned himself in early this morning… will continue to report as the situation unfolds._

For the first time since she undertook this project, Ariadne smiles. 

9\. 

She is an old woman now, as thin and fragile as her string. Sometimes she feels like that string is the only thing holding her together as she passes her hundredth birthday and beyond, tying her to life long past her expiration date. It comes as a relief, then, when she finally feels herself slipping away into what she hopes will be an eternal sleep. Unfortunately, Ariadne is not that lucky.

Her eyes open to a familiar sight. The hallways of her old university wrap around her, filled with projections of her fellow students. She is still old, but she feels her years slipping away until she is back to how she was at this time, still wearing her cardigans and scarves. Miles spots her and pulls her over. 

“Don’t you have somewhere to be, Ariadne? It’s time for class,” he says. Surely enough, the hallway is now empty except for the two of them.

“It’s time for class,” he repeats, the words tripping over each other in a glitchy echo. “It’s time… class… time for… class it’s… for class… it’s time,”

“It’s time,” she agrees, and leaves him sputtering, a broken record in the middle of the hallway, as she turns the corner and finds herself in the pouring rain. She identifies it immediately as the first level of the Fischer job before she even sees the freight train in the middle of the street. She did build it, after all, and who wouldn’t recognize their own creation?

Ariadne smiles. Each of the levels to this job holds a special place in her heart, and it comes as no surprise that the hotel and snow fortress are the next two locations she passes through, and then limbo as Mal and Cobb created it all those years ago. By this point she knows exactly where she is, caught in her own maze. Even if she wanted to dally in any of the locations, she can feel the string pulling her through, closer and closer to her own center. She cannot turn back now.

She passes through her apartment in Paris, every possible surface covered with blueprints, whiteboard marker writing on the floor-to-ceiling windows, theories about the mazes. It triggers a ping of nostalgia, but she keeps going, stepping out the door into the dirty neighborhood of the double agent she altered. It’s populated now with the same beggars, the same hookers. She sees Olivia, the girl who directed her to the mole. Olivia smiles and waves now, but Ariadne doesn’t give her a second glance. She stopped being distracted by pretty faces a long time ago.

Ariadne pulls herself up the fire escape and through the window into a colorful outdoor cafe. She walks down the street purposefully as the stands of fruit and vegetables explode in the background. The road behind her starts to bend upwards, folding over onto itself, but Ariadne just keeps walking. She knows how this goes. She’s already lived through this moment, this initial realization that that there is so much _more_ that she can create. That wonder and astonishment is not gone, but transformed into a curiosity, not about what she can do, but about what she will become.

The past falls apart behind her as the world crumbles like a cliffside into the sea. She hasn’t looked back once this journey, and she doesn’t plan on it now. The future is all that matters at this point.

She quickens her pace as she reaches Pont de Bir-Hakeim, breaking into a jog as she takes the steps up onto the bridge, pushing people out of the way as she runs towards the two large mirrors. As it is, they’re lined up next to each other, blocking the Eiffel Tower from view, but that’s not Ariadne’s concern. She grabs one and drags it perpendicular to the edge of the bridge, not even looking at the projections she’s crushing with the heavy mirror. They are just projections, after all, and fade away before she could do any actual damage to them. She is a single minded tour de force. Not even here, with a mirror directly in front of her, does Ariadne pause to look at herself or her surroundings. She is an army in miniature, an unstoppable force of nature with a singular goal: reach the center.

Now.

The mirrors are in place, and Ariadne finally stops. She is standing awkwardly once again, hands unsure of what to do. But then she looks at herself, really _looks_ at herself, and any bit of doubt leaves her mind. There is only one way forward, only one passageway she has yet to travel, and she must follow it wherever it leads her. Ariadne has never been able to resist the temptation of the unopened box.

She puts her hand up to the mirror and _presses_.

* * *

0.

The mind is a maze, and only Ariadne knows the way out. Limbo is calling, and she must answer. She takes one last breath and jumps, falling forever and ever.


End file.
